Eddie Glaude: Can You Imagine What Our Politics Would Be Like If We Would Untether It from the Ugliness of Race that Shadows This Country?

EXCERPT:

GLAUDE: “And so I think part of what we have to do is kind of disentangle the idea of freedom as the possession of one group and begin to live it in a very powerful way. Because just as you have those amazing teachers in Meridian saying, 'This is what we’re going to do,' we also had folks starting seg schools around the same time, right? And we know what those seg schools meant for education, public education in the state of Mississippi. And so there’s this kind of lived contradiction that I think, Joe, requires a kind of honesty. Can you imagine what our politics would be like if we would untether it from the ugliness of race that shadows this country, if we weren’t talking about states' rights politics and thinking that it was shadowed by the ugliness of slavery and Jim Crow segregation, that it was just an ideological difference, that I could actually give voice to some of the conservative tendencies that I have without it seeming like I’m selling out black folk and the like? Could you imagine if we untethered our politics from this? But that requires honesty, it seems to me."